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Excerpts of new work by graduates of UVA’s creative writing program

Since UVA’s MFA in Creative Writing program graduated its first class in 1982, its alumni have won Pushcart Prizes, Stegner Fellowships, the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, the Rome Prize Fellowship and other awards. The program, which each year accepts 10 students—five in fiction, five in poetry—from an average of 600 total applications, is consistently ranked among the top 10 in the nation. Jeb Livingood, the program’s associate director, has kept a record of all alumni books published since he started his job in 2011. Here is a selection of recent and forthcoming works from creative writing alumni, with a sampling from the first page of each.

Prodigals: Stories

by Greg Jackson (Grad ’13)Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 2016

The characters in Jackson’s collection are hyperintelligent and lost—searching for something greater than themselves. In the first story, friends throw a final, debaucherous party.

We ate well: cassoulets, steak frites, squid-ink risotto with porcini, spices from Andhra Pradesh, Kyoto, Antwerp. Of course we drank: pure agaves, rye whiskeys, St-Germain, old Scotch. We spent our hot December afternoons next to the custom saltwater pool or below the parasols of palm fronds, waiting, I suppose, to feel at peace, to baptize our minds in an enforced nullity, to return to a place from which we could begin again.

This was a few years ago in Palm Springs, at the end of a very forgettable year.

Cannibal

by Safiya Sinclair (Grad ’14)University of Nebraska Press, September 2016

The poems in this book, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, concern childhood in Jamaica (where Sinclair was raised) and explore what it means to be a black woman in America. In March, Sinclair received a 2016 Whiting Award.

“Home”

Have I forgotten it—wild conch-shell dialect,

black apostrophe curledtight on my tongue?

Or how the Spanish built wallsof broken glass to keep me out

but the Doctor Bird kept chasingand raking me in: This place

is your place, wreathed in redSargassum, ancient driftwood

nursed on the pensive sea.

Nitro Mountain

by Lee Clay Johnson (Grad ’11)Knopf, May 2016

Johnson’s novel, set in contemporary Appalachia, follows a cohort of charming, hapless people who, as one character says, “are guilty of the same strange cruelties, hurting ourselves to hurt the other, then crawling back and asking forgiveness.”

We were sitting in my truck in front of the diner she was working at. Greg, her boss, had everybody convinced he was a genius.

“He’s really smart,” Jennifer said. “You know what he told me yesterday while I was in the kitchen?” I rolled down the window and let in the cold air. She took face powder from the glove box, bent the rearview at her face and dusted her nose. Headlights came flickering from way behind us. “You don’t even care,” she said.

“I care,” I said.“I’d like to kick his ass.” The headlights were getting closer.

Rapture

by Sjohnna McCray (Grad ’97)Graywolf Press, April 2016

The poems in McCray’s first book, winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, tell the story of McCray’s father, an American soldier, meeting McCray’s mother, a “comfort woman,” during the Vietnam War.

The Body Distances (A Hundred Blackbirds Rising)

by Mark Wagenaar (Grad ’10)University of Massachusetts Press, April 2016

With his second book of poems, Juniper Prize for Poetry winner Wagenaar has drawn comparisons to Walt Whitman for his odes to a complicated world.

“The Body Distances (Still-Life with Everything in the World)”

&ellip;to the first page of the Book of Little Miracles as a child awakensfrom a coma to an Adele song. Turn the page, & a doctor pores over

a man’s chart, trying to understand how his heart grew an extra vessel.Then a photo falls from the book: a miner wrapped in a Chilean flag,

half-carried into his first sunlight in sixty-eight days. Another photo:the heavily bandaged face of the woman who survived the bullet’s tear

through her brain. A perfect channel the exact size of the bullethad formed twenty-two years ago in the womb, a defect

if anyone had noticed.

Security

by Gina Wohlsdorf (Grad ’13)Algonquin Books, June 2016

Wohlsdorf’s first book, set in a luxurious and isolated resort, is a thriller in the vein of works by Daphne Du Maurier, Shirley Jackson and Stephen King.

The hotel is straight and monolithic, a stark white block on a flat stretch of Santa Barbara beach. … It’s visible from the Pacific Coast Highway but only just. The driveway is quite long so as to accommodate the hedge maze, which is the size of half a football field, and it is darkening now, in the hotel’s shadow.

Dear Fang, With Love

by Rufi Thorpe (Grad ’09)Knopf, May 2016

In Thorpe’s second novel, a father takezs his teenage daughter, Vera, to his ancestral home of Lithuania after she suffers a psychotic break. Part of the narrative is told through Vera’s letters to her boyfriend, Fang.

Dear Fang,

At this moment, we are mental twins. We are each alone, two discrete meat skeletons separated by space, cut off from each other by time, one of us reading a note, the other one writing it, yet we are finally together. Whenever you read this, even if it is years from now, though probably it will be only a few days since I hid this in your underwear drawer, but whenever you do find it: You will be inside my mind because you are reading and I am writing the exact same words. For just a moment, you are not Fang. You are me.

Losing It

by Emma Rathbone (Grad ’06)Riverhead, July 2016

Rathbone’s second novel, which takes place over one summer in North Carolina, centers on a former competitive swimmer who is deeply anxious about being a virgin in her mid-20s.

Chelsea Maitland. She was my first friend to lose her virginity. She was fifteen. She told me about it one afternoon on her parents’ remodeled back deck after school. The railings were made of a bright white vinyl that hurt my eyes. … “How did it feel?” I asked. I focused on the laid-back ceramic frog with an outdoor thermometer in it. “I couldn’t say,” said Chelsea, with a little smile, her face folded and smug. … Chelsea Maitland of all people. ... The implication beneath our friendship had always been that I was the special one.

That I would always be the one to get the thing.

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